CSotD: Times Square Heroes
Skip to comments
Jeff Danziger smacks one over the wall in deep centerfield.
The sports analogy is not inappropriate, because young goofballs often celebrate championships by rioting in the streets, which might be understandable if they were overturning cars, starting fires and smashing store windows in their opponent's city. Seems kind of bizarre to shout "Hurray for us!" and then trash your own downtown.
But explaining the psyche of the 19-year-old male is a daunting task. It is enough, I think, to observe and comment on it, as Danziger does here.
Back in the summer of 2002, I sat a booth at the Washington County Fair on behalf of the paper I was working for.
Across the way from us was a booth signing people up for VISA cards. If you signed up for a credit card, you got an American flag towel.
Next to us was the United States Army Reserve, also willing to provide information on signing up.
I guess I don't have to report on which booth was mobbed with 19-year-olds and which one was avoided as if they had been handing out cases of the plague.
Let me be clear: I am not a veteran, nor am I a fan of the Selective Service. But, like most things that matter a whole lot, it's not that simple.
When I was in college, we had an interesting seminar on "The Crito," in which Socrates awaits his execution and his friend bribes the guards to let him escape. Socrates refuses the rescue, saying that, since he has accepted the benefits of citizenship in Athens, he must also accept the city's justice, even when it appears unjust.
This was pretty heady stuff in the Vietnam era, and our seminar group was part of a small, tight-knit department that contained both antiwar people and ROTC members.
Since we were colleagues, and had a professor moderating the discussion, we kept it on a civil footing, and one of the main themes which emerged from the anti-draft side was this: It was unjust to draft 19-year-olds in a nation where you could not vote until you were 21, because we were not yet full citizens and had no voice in our governance.
It was an unanswerable point, which may have played a large part in lowering the voting age to 18, but that happened at roughly the same time the draft ended anyway.
But I think that, in that era, most of the people who waved flags and cheered the war were either beyond draft age or willing to go.
And let me be clear about what that means: The hangers-on, the mob, had come over to the anti-war side. After the Chicago Convention was on primetime television, after the Monkees began to flash the peace sign and burn incense on the air, certainly after Woodstock, there was no problem getting up a large group to march in the street and chant.
The core group who opposed the war remained sincere, just as the core group who support current efforts remain sincere. It is a media fabrication that the "hippies" (a bit of a media fabrication to begin with) cut their hair and went to Wall Street. My activist friends today are teachers, community organizers, medical workers and at least one (recently retired) worker at the EPA.
It was the sunshine patriots who moved on, who became the next media sensation, the Yuppies. And they were, like Danziger's "Time Square Heroes," never more than hangers-on to begin with.
For my part, I find that, with the voting age lowered, I'm less opposed to national service, though I would expect it to apply to both men and women and I would want it to include options beyond the military. I would also want national service, whether compulsory or not, to include generous educational benefits, either as part of service (in, for instance, education or the medical field) or as a reward later.
But looking back on what was, rather than what I wish had been, I have no idea what my response to a draft notice would have been.
It didn't happen to me, and I saw enough unexpected things happen to people (on both sides of the debate) who did get a notice that I realize it is as much folly to declare what you would have done as it was, back then, to declare what you were going to do. Of course, I hope I would have behaved with honor.
Here's a classic Phil Ochs song on the topic. Wish I had found a video of Phil singing it himself, but this is a decent cover. It's particularly appropriate here because the revolutionary Ochs's contempt for draft dodgers largely went over the heads of most people who merrily sang this song, thinking it was about "sticking it to the man."
I certainly knew more people who found themselves to suddenly be asthmatic or under weight or to have ulcers than who, like Socrates, accepted the consequences of their previously stated opinions.
They were the Times Square Heroes of our era. Every era has them.
,
Comments
Comments are closed.